How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn’t exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :
- Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
- Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
- Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
- Bots should say who made/hosts it
Do spoiler foldouts maintain their functionality across UIs, either directly or in essence (eg. popup instead)?
Part of me wishes that Lemmy also had spoilers that reveal in place, but foldout spoilers have some functionality that makes me appreciate having both on hand. I’d bet bots could benefit from using that to minimize visual space if we go through with it.
These rules seem great honestly. The main bot that comes to mind is the TL;DR bot, which one could easily prompt for in a post if they want a TL;DR, if those communities want to enable it for that specific community. Eventually, a list of promptable bots could pop up in one of the instances so that people know which bots are available to be prompted. Alternatively, someone could make a website to list them or something. I can see there being a healthy bot ecosystem forming based on people’s needs.
Since we have more control over the source code, I think eventually what would be nice are community plugins to replace some of the functionality of these bots. For example, a plugin could de-AMP a link, or could provide a banner indicating the rules on a post. If someone really wanted to, they could make a plugin to auto-generate summaries of articles too and include it somewhere in the UI. Since these rules are for Beehaw specifically, I don’t think bots which create new posts are that relevant, since there aren’t really any niche-specific communities (like a bot which posts changelogs for a game or something), just broad communities.
Any bots not clearly labelled as bots should be given a warning, then banned from the instance in my opinion. The bot setting exists for a reason, bypassing it indicates that the bot author is not willing to respect the rules of the communities the bot is posting in.
If they’re informative and/or helpful, I don’t mind bots. If they’re those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they’re/their/there bots, the your/you’re bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can’t imagine those changed anyone’s behavior or spelling.
I’m not completely against those, they sometimes made me edit a comment, and can be educational to both native speakers and those learning the language.
However, it’s not nice to force them upon people, it should be each user’s choice whether they want those tips or not, so I’d say: maybe, but not for Beehaw (unless maybe for some “learn-[some_language]” community).
Honestly, as a programmer, I’d like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don’t degrade the quality of the community.
Maybe there could be a community on Beehaw where people could post about their bots and associated commands, so we could learn how they could be called into threads where they would be helpful?
This could be added to docs.beehaw.org ;)
Please keep the bots to a minimum.
Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.
I just don’t want things to revert back to reddit days where I’m constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.
Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:
The master Nap then said: “Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to.”
This philosophy makes sense for IRC, but how would this work on Beehaw/Lemmy? You have to DM a bot to interact with it? How would people even know it exists? In IRC there is a list of users in the channel you can scan for helpful bots. I’m failing to see the equivalent with Lemmy.
Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don’t take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it’s cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren’t useful here imo.
Post bots, I’m kind of on the side of I’d rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won’t be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.
The TLDR bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
